Paris, in the middle of the afternoon. Alain Declercq is in the vaulted cellars of an old mushroom farm that has been converted into a shooting range. He goes deep into the entrails of its labyrinthine passages, kitted out in protective goggles and an anti-noise helmet. The air is pierced through by the sound of shots. The atmosphere evokes a war situation, an attack, but there is no sign of panic. Everything is cool and collected. The passages are deserted. They must be gunning down ghosts. He starts testing the calibres and shooting speeds: about 300 kph, and preferably a 22 Long Rifle. He is aiming for the perfect bullet hole. The precise shattering of wood, powder scorched onto the surface, a row of holes. The victims: Cheney, Bush, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Negroponte, Carlucci, Myers, Condoleezza Rice... The most fearsome politicos of the last administration. The title: Rest in Peace. Official portrait or tombstone inscription? Manipulating these likenesses, the artist is puppet master of a drama, dressing these actors on the international stage in fixed make-up, a horribly commercial Hollywood smile that allows absolutely no expression other than that of guaranteed success. At the same time as Declercq stigmatizes these political figures, he also grants them a way of surviving through art. But if this art restores and embalms, its mirror also magnifies. These bullet-marked marionettes are instruments of denunciation, enabling the artist to take a distanced view of this political or social reality that he transposes into the field of art.

Same principle, different method. Alain Declercq gets hold of a fine needle, some totally opaque film capsules and black gaffer tape. Shutting himself away in a cupboard at the end of the hall in his flat, he stamps out a disc of planfilm using a die with the same diameter as the capsule, places this disc at the bottom of the box, tapes it up and checks it. He does this eight times. Then sets out. The timing is too unpredictable for him to calculate precisely. First surveillance point: a metro exit, opposite the Bank of France. He waits until the coast is clear, then discreetly places his camera obscura on the stair rail, removes his finger, times the exposure, closes it again, tapes it up and checks. Speed is of the essence. (As a result of this practice he has already been held in custody briefly by the police, during the trial of a suspected member of Al Qaida whom he had been shadowing. The police thought it was germ warfare. What a relief! There was much mirth over this new tool they had just confiscated.) Second rendezvous, a little further on, along the river. This time he stands back more. He shoots three times. Alain Declercq has just photographed the Quai des Orfèvres. He has his revenge, a fine image of police headquarters, but taken on the sly, which immediately transforms everything into narrative, or even fiction.

From the production of the work through to its public presentation, the artist systematically overturns events and worrying at reality. He tells himself stories. Hence his special interest in these new forms of spectacle that are invading our world with their unlikely and dramatic turns of events: crimes of state, political infighting, demonstrations, military parades, bombs . . . He may be following a secret agent in his frantic fight against terrorism, converting the homeless into American soldiers, making Boeing missiles, recreating a naval battle, making a truck with a false load or an armour-clad yacht, but whatever he does, it’s the staging that really counts. If he photographs the façades of FBI and CIA headquarters, of the Pentagon and the Quai des Orfèvres, it is also because they are stage sets to die for. The self-reflexive layers endlessly accumulate on his works. His camera obscuras are like black boxes, recording and superimposing stories on a single tape. A homemade chemical weapon, a piece of military telecoms technology, or again, originally, an enemy apparatus captured in wartime but impossible to probe because maybe booby-trapped: the black box intrigues. Alain Declercq puts it to work.

Florise Pagès is an art critic and an artistic consulant.